From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli – 11 April

Always, Australia has bragged about its mateship ethos, which, it is claimed, was forged in the trenches of Gallipoli. Something has changed. When did we become such a hard-hearted nation?

DISTRESSING television reports of children, born in this country, being threatened with deportation because they are stricken with a disability are too awful to contemplate, and show the ugliest lack of concern.

The Australian Migration Act allows families who are not permanent residents to be deported if their children have a disability, even if the off spring was born in Australia and holds an Australian birth certificate.

Incredibly, the lawmakers have, at some stage in the past, given this matter serious consideration. They have wittingly taken the decision to categorise and rid the community of the hereditarily unfit, even if they were born in Australia.

It is argued that invoking Nazism demonstrates a lack of original thought and an inability to successfully prosecute an argument; however, there are those instances in a moral discourse when one is left incredulous; groping to make logical sense of the grotesque proffered notion. Regrettably, one is reminded.

Spasticity and intellectual competence are not related. Applying the Australian model of genetic discrimination (and let us call it for what it is), the late Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018); the brilliant English theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author; director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge; and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge – 1979 – 2009, would have been sent packing by Australian immigration. They argue we have no place for his type in this country!

The suggestion, by application of law, that those infants born with a physical defectiveness have no contribution to make; are to be denied permanent citizenship; are, by extrapolation, a burden on society; and are to be deported, is indecent. Such inhumane discrimination has no place in a civilised society. The Queen said in a speech – 1954, “Australia may well seem the promised… it has a healthy vigorous people… only a pessimist would set bounds to its future.”

Somehow, somewhere, something has gone awry, terribly.

How easily, and quickly, some people forget! Excepting for the First Nation Peoples of this land (and whose country was invaded), we are, each and every one of us, down through the centuries, descended from the immigrant chain who came here seeking a better life. Without exception, our blood is other-nations and ethnically tainted. We are Australian by adoption. Having been gifted a cornucopia of myriad opportunities in one of the greatest countries in the world, we are quick and willing to deny our fellow travellers the same chances which now we take for granted.

Mateship is, at best, a mythical state-of-being, and whose reality is dubious, and application is problematic.

Where once there was an embracing, caring spirit of community, now there is a hard-heartedness; an overwhelming lack of regard for those whose path is more thorny; a societal disconnect with the travails of those who have fallen by the wayside; a prurient delight in watching the unravelling of other people’s lives.

We are a prosperous nation. Have we come to the pass where, simply because of an accident of birth, we would condemn a child with cerebral palsy to a life of abject misery in a developing country?

Richness of life comes not from the accumulation of material possessions. It comes from a willing to change the colour of someone’s life; to lend a hand when most it is needed. To see the wants of others as being as important as your own; to share the load and ease the burden; to offer that support which we once called mateship.

One could be forgiven for suggesting it is now more a case of, “F*** you, Jack. I’m alright!”

Roland can be heard with Brett Macdonald each Monday at 10.45am on 3BA and contacted via [email protected].